“A diamond, is the symbol for love, commitment, and a joyful new beginning,” said the TV commercial. Many of the world's diamonds, are mined using practices that exploit workers, children, and communities. A million diamond diggers in Africa earn less than a dollar a day. Miners are dying in accidents, child labor is widespread, and corrupt leaders are depriving mining communities of funds badly needed for economic development. In extreme cases, diamond mining can cause entire ecosystems to collapse. Diamond miners in the Kono district of eastern Sierra Leone have left behind thousands of mining pits. Wildlife has vanished, topsoil has eroded, and land once suitable for farming is now a desolate moonscape. These sparkling stones are more a curse than a blessing. Too often, the world’s diamond mines produce not only diamonds but also civil wars, violence, human rights abuses, worker exploitation, environmental degradation, and unspeakable human suffering. Where is the love in civil war, violence, human, rights being played around with like a teenager stuck at home and left with nothing but there is a brand new Xbox right in front of him. But wait... the list goes down there's still worker exploitation, environmental degradation, and human suffering. Where is the joy in all of this? The Love? The only thing that seems to be true is the commitment... a commitment daily life filled with lies and crime.

[Search: Describe Blood Diamond]. Result: Could you imagine being taken away at the age of five taken away by rebel gangs, given drugs and alcohol and being brainwashed? Then being ordered to kill your dearest family members and not care at all? All of these cruel and unusual things don't happen with all diamonds. But most of them have some type of illegal activities going on. All of the diamonds that somehow involve violating someone’s human rights would be called a blood diamond, or other wise know as a conflict diamond too. These diamonds are found in...

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...Consequences of Sierra Leonese Diamond Trafficking
The country of Sierra Leone, surrounded in the North by Guinea and in the South East by Liberia, acquires its wealth due to its supply of many mineral resources such as diamonds, chrome, bauxite, iron ore, and rutile. Sierra Leone has many diamond mines and the qualities of the diamonds are known to be top-quality gem diamonds. Since there is a large demand fordiamonds this allows the country to become wealthy. At the end of the Liberian Civil War in 1999, the Revolutionary United Front, a rebel group, took power. This power allowed them to terrorize the population into mining for diamonds in order to receive the profits needed to finance the army. There were three major international consequences that resulted from Sierra Leonese diamond trafficking. The first consequence is the launch of the Kimberley Process. Through the imposed implementations the international community has ensured that its monitoring requirements will decrease the trade of “conflict” diamonds. The second consequence is the rise of the diamond trade companies promising reliability of their diamonds. Many of the companies closed their buying offices in rebel controlled areas in order to ensure that all their diamonds are “conflict” free. The third consequence that resulted from the...

...Sierra Leone “Blood Diamond” Conflict
Many of the world’s major conflicts arise from the want or need for resources, but the extent to which these resources are responsible for such conflicts, tends to be misunderstood. Conflicts may arise with first a dispute on who gets control over what resources, but followed by other factors adding up to contribute to the said conflict, including, corrupt leaders, religion, debt ect. When this is the case, it becomes confusing on what aspects are responsible for specific conflicts. Resource conflicts are a common occurrence in many African countries, as Africa is a continent with a surplus of natural resources and minerals, that the rest of the world wants control over. A collection of issues arose in Sierra Leone, thus starting a civil war. The diamond mining industry in Sierra Leone makes for half of their exports contributing greatly to their yearly income, although this annual income is minimal. Diamonds in Sierra Leone have paid for weaponry, which has contributed to warfare, they have added to the country’s corruption and have affected the international world, causing several interventions. Therefore, diamonds are greatly responsible for the conflict in Sierra Leone.
The trade of “Blood diamonds” fuelled Sierra Leone’s civil war from 1991 through to 2002, as these diamonds were paying for weaponry. The civil war occurred...

...﻿English 111
December 8, 2011
Blood Diamonds: Life of the Cursed Stone
A blood diamond is not a diamond made out of blood, it’s a diamond mined in a war zone and sold usually clandestinely in order to finance war efforts. When one buys a diamond how do you know that you’re not helping people get killed? There are ways that people can use to make sure the diamonds are legal. Some diamond companies will sell blood diamonds without knowing or companies are just too greedy and don’t care if the diamonds were bought at the expense of another person's life. The way diamonds are mined and how worker are treated is a terrible show of how people will fight over inanimate objects for their own gain, with no respect for human life.
Sahr Amara is bent low, knee-deep in a muddy river, in his fifth hour of his workday. Such as he has each day for the past week, the 18-year-old will earn a wage of only 7 cents, enough to buy himself a bowl of porridge to see him through the day. Yet he returns every morning to dig in the lifeless heat on the edge of Koidu, a town in eastern Sierra Leone, hunting for the one thing he says could transform his life: a diamond. Since he is the oldest of six, (three who have died of diseases) much of his family's future rests on his prospects. If Amara finds a big diamond, he can afford to...

...﻿Diamond Wire Saw Machining
ABSTRACT
The process monitoring and mechanics of fixed abrasive diamond wire saw machining are investigated in this study. New techniques to affix diamond particles to a steel wire core have advanced to make this process feasible for the machining of ceramics, wood, and foam materials. Developments in fixed abrasive diamond wire machining are first reviewed. Advantages of using fixed abrasivediamond wire machining are then introduced. The process monitoring and signal processing techniques for measuring the cutting forces, wire speed, down feed rate, and wire bow angle in diamond wire saw machining are developed. The application of a capacitance sensor to measure the wire bow and a procedure to convert the wire bow to vertical cutting force in a rocking motion
wire saw machine are developed. The tension force of the wire during cutting is also derived and discussed.
Keywords: Diamond wire saw; Wire saw machining; Process monitoring
INTRODUCTION
Slicing single crystal silicon into thin wafers with minimum warp, uniform thickness, and low kerf loss has revitalized the interest in wire saw machining technology, a concept that originated from the carpenter wire saw for wood machining. The early wire saw wafer slicing development in the 1990s applied a loose abrasive slurry on bare wire. During machining, a small portion of the abrasive is...

...Introduction
“People lose hands, legs, arms for real. Little was known of Sierra Leone and how it connect to the diamonds we own.”
These are lyrics from a recent song by popular hip-hop artist Kanye West regarding the human rights violations in Sierra Leone. Most people walk into jewelers around the world and drop thousands of dollars on diamond-studded jewelry without knowing the conflict behind their purchase. Fueled by the West’s desire fordiamonds, wars raged in Sierra Leone over the rights to mine these precious stones for profit, causing deprivation and the displacement of innocent citizens and forcing children to take arms.
Background of Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone is and always has been socially and economically underdeveloped. Diamonds account for fifty percent of the country’s exports, making the diamond industry the most profitable industry in Sierra Leone (Conflict Diamonds). As a former British colony, English is the national language of Sierra Leone, even though only 30% of its citizens are literate. Aside from a lack of education, sufficient healthcare is hard to come across in Sierra Leone. Like many other African nations, AIDS/HIV is a reoccurring problem. Seven percent of the population is infected with AIDS/HIV and the average life expectancy in Sierra Leone is forty years old (Conflict Diamonds). Due to their minimal lifestyle, the people of Sierra...

...Case 1 | Conflict Diamonds |
| | During the late 1990s South African diamond product De Beers and other companies on the diamond industry discovered that some of the diamonds they were buying or selling came from groups who used the proceeds to finance brutal civil wars. In Sierra Leone, rebels took control of diamond mines by systematically chopping off the arms and hands of as many as 20,000 children, women and men until the diamond operations were turned over to them. Similarly events took place at diamond mines in Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. About 4 million civilians have died in the civil wars financed by the diamonds. Anxious to avoid a consumer boycott of “conflict diamonds” DeBeers and other diamond companies in 2000 formed the World Diamond Council, a group made up of buyers and sellers of diamonds that pledged to use the “Kimberley Process” to track diamonds from the mine to the jewelry shop to ensure that diamonds they sold customers were “conflict-free”. However in 2004, Global Witness, a watch dog group, published “Broken Vows” a report of a survey it conducted which concluded that “83 percent of diamond companies surveyed are falling short on implementing the basic measures” of the 2000 agreement to keep conflict...

...Questions
The conflict of the diamonds were that gemstones were being mined or stolen by rebels fighting internationally recognized governments. The groups that were benefiting from the trade of conflict diamonds include the Revolutionary United Front, UNITA, and other rebel groups. The groups that were hurt by the mining of these diamonds were the communities of Sierra Leone, Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and other African nations that were experiencing civil wars during the 1990s.
The three sectors that were concerned with the problem of conflict diamonds were the diamond industry (the business sector), The United Nations and several other governments (government sector), and lastly the human right activists (Civil Society). The business sectors main interest was preserving what the diamond idealized. The government sector, which was the United Nations and several other governments, were worried that conflict diamonds were funding these rebel groups. The civil sector were concerned that the communities and villages where conflict diamonds were being mined caused much pain and suffering for those who lived there. Their interests converged because they realized that each solo-sector couldn’t ensure that the diamonds were being mined under proper conditions and workers were being treated ethically. Therefore causing them to united...

...Vonkel Enterprises have recently purchased Thembeka, a company that specializes in the sale and distribution of gold and diamond jewelry. This company designs, manufactures and markets fine jewelry throughout South Africa. It had previously been a family run business, and following the death of the founder and CEO, family members decided to sell the enterprise. Vonkel saw the potential for this business and purchased it, with intentions of improving supply chain performance.
The domestic supply chain involves inbound shipments of raw materials from a number of small suppliers to a manufacturing location in Pretoria. Once the jewelry has been created, shipments are sent through a transportation intermediary to retail stores in Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg. The challenges Thembeka face are common to the fashion industry. Rapidly changing styles and preferences require the company to react quickly and adapt designs to suit consumer demands. The peak demand periods occur throughout December and in mid-February, with a smaller demand peak in the spring. The Thembeka brand and style is well established throughout South Africa, and Vonkel decides that it will keep the name to maintain brand loyalty.
In addition to making supply chain improvements, Vonkel Enterprises are planning to export their products to the UK. The jewelry market has experienced a steady increase over the past ten years, and has continued to grow over the past year despite predictions for...